plug-in architecture (was : MC IDE's home)

[Richard Gaskin]

jbv wrote:

> could someone be kind enough to explain to me briefly how does
> this plugin arch. work in Rev ?

Basically it's just a menu built dynamically to provide quick access to
stack files in a "Plugins" folder.  Rev builds its menu at startup, but my
own plugins menu works so fast being built on mouseDown that I've grown fond
of the convenience of not having to quit MC to have new additions appear in
the menu.

Rev goes a step beyond simply opening the stack file with special messages
sent to them when they're opened and for updating, but personally I've not
used them (thus far I've written all my plugins to be usable in both Rev and
MC, with no dependencies on Rev-specific libs), and am not motivated to add
those messages unless the folks here feel the parallelism is important.

With the built-in style property of a stack being persistent, I've not found
a reason to use the Rev-specific custom property for setting a plugin's mode
when opening it.  Unless someone can exlain a benefit to having a custom
prop which seems to provide a functionality already built-in, I'm inclined
not to support that and suggest the built-in property instead.  But again,
if the folks here feel it's useful its not hard to support it.

I suppose in the MC IDE it might make sense to add a "Plug-Ins" menu (or the
more popular but less gramatically correct "Plugins") as the second-to-last
menu, between MC's Text and Help menus.

I'm very strongly opposed to hierarchical menus except where absolutely
necessary, as they're simply more physically diffcult to use (lose the use
of your dominant arm for a few months and accessibility issues become very
clear <g>).  I'm envisioning this Plug-Ins menu being a simple drop-down.

Does this seem a workable proposal?

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
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